How To Say No - My Favorite Templates

Use these templates to politely decline requests and protect your time

A lot of leaders live in fear of their inboxes. In addition to messages related to projects you are working on, there is also a constant flow of unsolicited emails and LinkedIn messages from people you don’t know, with requests you don’t have the time for or that don’t align with your interests.

There’s a great way to manage this inbox mess that I started doing years ago at the advice of others: create standard templates to decline frequent requests.

Using templates provides an easy win-win: it shows courtesy to those who are reaching out, protects your time, and stops you from getting the dreaded follow-up requests. Keep track of requests you get frequently, then write out a thoughtful response to one and save it to use later.

Here are several of my favorite templates: